Re: thanks again for the editionEngraver

[Urs Liska]

Hi Kieren,

interesting: I think you are 100% right, yet I have to express 
objections - as it's a matter of perspective. But now I think I should 
have said "depending on the perspective original breaks *can be* part of 
the content".

Am 30.10.2014 13:21, schrieb Kieren MacMillan:
> Hi Urs,
>
> > original breaks *are* part of the content so that's not a mixture.
> I disagree: original breaks are, in my opinion, part of the original 
> presentation (engraving) of the content. There are, of course, grey areas in 
> the “content versus presentation” discussion — e.g., are clefs content or 
> presentation? (lately I’m leaning towards “presentation”) — but I’m solidly of 
> the opinion that dimensional engraving choices like line and page breaks, which 
> were dictated almost entirely by the physical [hence presentational] properties 
> of the original engraving, are presentation.

When you're looking at a score with a scholarly edition in mind (and 
that's what *I* usually do) you treat information like this as part of 
the content you're editing. The fact that there's a break somewhere 
gives you so much information to judge errors (e.g. issues of 
half-missing slurs or wrong accidentals, clefs etc.) that it's vital to 
process the information. Typically you'd mention in a critical remark 
when an editorial decision has been influenced by a break. Sometimes you 
can also find an explicit list of breaks, and in some types of edition 
you'd see original breaks marked in the new edition (see 
https://github.com/openlilylib/openlilylib/tree/master/editorial-tools/line-break-marks).

Current trends of (especially) digital music edition go into the 
direction of considering the "edition" as being constituted of the 
*encoding* of the content. In that concept the visual, audible or 
textual *rendering* is a more or less arbitrary instantiation of the 
edition. And these concepts tend to encode as much information as 
possible from the "sources" (in the sense of the phyiscally existing 
evidence of the composition) and treat it as part of the content. Line 
breaks are among the more coarse aspects in that perspective. One tries 
to preserve as much as possible for the reference of future scholars, 
from paper color and watermarks over marks with different ink to 
different and potentially conflicting pagination schemes of different 
writers. I can tell you that nothing is finally neglectable, and the 
most arbitrary informations can at some point trigger fundamental 
questions in a later person looking at the case.

So to come back to the origin: In my perspective breaks are part of the 
content of the edition, although not part of the composition.

> For the record, that still doesn’t change my opinion about your functions: They 
> are worthy of existing, and could be a useful addition to the main distro.

That's a completely different story, and I'm currently not interested in 
spending more energy on this ...

Best
Urs

> Best,
> Kieren.
> _______________________
>
> Kieren MacMillan, composer
> www:  <http://www.kierenmacmillan.info>
> email:  address@hidden